1 November 2025
- Waitakere Voices
- West City String Orchestra
- Intermission and Art Exhibition
- West City Youth Concert Band
- West City Concert Band
Pictures at an Exhibition invites us to experience music and art side by side, each illuminating the other. As we move through this programme, every piece of music is paired with an image – a painting, sculpture, or artwork that resonates with its spirit. Like walking through a gallery where sound and vision converse, we are invited to see the familiar anew and to hear the visual world more deeply.
WAITAKERE VOICES
Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring – J.S. Bach
We begin with J.S. Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, whose flowing lines have made it beloved at weddings and concerts alike and connect us with Bach’s timeless devotion. The chosen image, the richly detailed Ghent Altarpiece, mirrors this sense of radiant order and sacred joy.
Lacrimosa from the Requiem – W.A. Mozart
Mozart’s Lacrimosa, left unfinished at his death, is among the most poignant movements of his Requiem. Its weeping phrases, halting suspensions, and rising cries capture both grief and the fragile hope that transcends it. Paired with Michelangelo’s Pietà, the sculpture’s silent sorrow deepens the music’s lament – mother and son, stone and sound, united in an expression of profound human loss and divine compassion.
The Ground – Ola Gjeilo
From the classical masters we turn to a contemporary voice, Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo. The Ground, based on themes from his Sunrise Mass, combines the richness of sacred tradition with modern sonorities. Its luminous harmonies and expansive sweep offer both grounding and transcendence. Georgia O’Keeffe’s Lake George Reflections provides a visual parallel: rooted in the earth, yet opening outward to spacious horizons.
Down to the River to Pray – Trad.
We then move into the American spiritual tradition with Down to the River to Pray. This old hymn, sung at baptisms and gatherings for more than a century, reached millions through the film O Brother, Where Art Thou. Its call-and-response style draws us together in song, much as it did in the communities where it was born. Grandma Moses’ Church in the Wild Wood captures the same spirit of simplicity, faith, and gathering by the waterside.
Remember Me (Coco) – Kristen Anderson-Lopez & Robert Lopez
In contrast, a modern lullaby from Disney Pixar’s Coco, Remember Me, captures the essence of love and memory that binds us to one another, even beyond death. Its gentle melody and heartfelt words have already earned it a permanent place in the Disney canon. The Ofrenda mural, filled with colour and symbols of remembrance, reflects the song’s celebration of memory and enduring connection.
What a Wonderful World – Weiss & Thiele
We continue with What a Wonderful World, first recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1967. It became an anthem of hope during a time of social upheaval, and its use in many films has only deepened its place as one of the most loved songs of all time. Kandinsky’s Yellow, Red, Blue resonates with this music – a burst of colour and movement that mirrors the song’s vision of beauty in diversity and harmony.
When You Believe (Prince of Egypt) – Stephen Schwartz
We close with When You Believe from The Prince of Egypt, a celebration of courage found in faith and community. Sung in the film by Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, it becomes a soaring anthem of collective hope in choral form. Norval Morrisseau’s Androgyny reflects this vision, its vibrant colours and intertwined forms expressing spiritual strength, unity, and transcendence.
WEST CITY STRING ORCHESTRA
The Abduction from the Seraglio, Overture – W.A. Mozart
There are two scenes in the movie Amadeus where Mozart is commissioned by Emperor Joseph II to compose an opera in German. At the end of the first performance the Emperor was reported to have exclaimed “Too beautiful for our ears, and an enormous number of notes, dear Mozart!” Mozart replied, “There are just as many notes as there should be.” It must be noted that Joseph II genuinely acknowledged and supported Mozart’s greatness as a composer. This is just an example of the light hearted banter that he, as an enlighten ruler of the 18th century, would accept and exchange with a commoner.
The opera is set in the time of the Barbary Corsairs who hijacked ships in the Mediterranean sea, kidnapping the crews and passengers to extort ransom money or to place them in slavery. The hero Belmonte, a Spanish nobleman, sets out to rescue his fiancé Konstanze from a Turkish harem. The opera was a huge success with countless performances during Mozart’s lifetime. It should have made him a rich man, but he was paid a flat fee and took no share in the profits.
The overture is Mozart’s version of the Turkish Janissary Band music with triangles and cymbals.
Amadeus Soundtrack Highlights – W.A. Mozart, arr. Larry Moore
The 1984 movie Amadeus is an adaption of the 1979 stage play by Peter Shaffer. It is a fictional account implying that an intense rivalry existed between the two 18th century composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri at the court of Emperor Joseph II of Austria.
In the movie Salieri is portrayed as a haughty unscrupulous villain. He realises that Mozart is a rare genius, harbours a jealous hatred for him, and resolves to ruin Mozart’s career. Mozart is portrayed as clownish, immature and dissolute with an obscene sense of humour. Throughout the movie Salieri rages that God had bestowed an incomparable gift for music on the contemptable Mozart, thereby overshadowing himself as a self-described “mediocrity”.
The real-life Salieri was a friendly gregarious character who enjoyed telling jokes. He was a highly acclaimed opera composer and most certainly was not jealous of anyone. He conducted some of Mozart’s works and was a very important composition teacher to Beethoven and Schubert. Mozart was a well-adjusted family man, a workaholic and a successful self-employed entrepreneur. In German speaking countries during that era a scatological kind of humour was quite normal.
This arrangement has four excerpts from scenes in the movie:
Piano Concerto No 22: Allegro, 3rd Movement: Mozart plays this movement during a concert in a park in the presence of Emperor Franz II.
Requiem Mass: “Confutatis Maledictus” (“When the accused are confounded”): Mozart is gravely ill and Salieri is by his bedside taking dictation for this section of the Requiem, intending to pass the Requiem off as his own after Mozart died.
Piano Concerto No 20: Romance 2nd Movement: This is played in the final scene and during the end credits of the movie. Salieri sums up the main premise of the movie and exclaims: “I speak for the mediocrities of the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint. Mediocrities everywhere – I absolve you.”
Symphony No 25. Allegro con Brio 1st Movement: The elderly Salieri suffered from many nervous breakdowns towards the end of his life. For the opening title of the movie he has just attempted suicide and is being carried off on a stretcher to an asylum in the dead of night.
La Bella Cubana – José Silvertre White Lafitte (1836-1918), arr. Robert Debbaut
Also known as Joseph White he was born in Cuba to a Spanish father and Cuban mother. In 1854 The American pianist composer Louis Gottschalk accompanied the 19-year-old Jose for his first public violin recital in Matanzas, Northern Cuba. He was so impressed that he arranged funds for Jose to travel to Paris and enrol at the Paris Conservatory. He won the first prize for Violin in 1856 and became a French citizen in 1870. He played the “Swansong” violin made by Antonio Stradivarius in 1737 during the last year of his life. His playing was highly praised by Rossini and others ranked him as a better violinist than the great Spaniard Sarasate.
He composed about 30 pieces for the violin including a highly virtuosic Concerto. La Bella Cubana (The beautiful Cuban Woman) was written for two violins and piano published in 1910. It is in the form of the Harbanera, a dance that originated in Cuba and was made famous by Bizet’s opera “Carmen”.
Prelude and Fiesta – Erik Morales
Eric Morales is an American trumpeter, conductor and composer. He has composed over 150 works in a large variety of settings, including wind, strings, orchestral, jazz and chamber ensembles. He is a strong supporter of music education in schools and the community.
Prelude and Fiesta was written for a string orchestra and percussion and is in two sections. The first section pays homage to the Afro-Cuban music traditions therefore is a perfect match for the “La Bella Cubana” item also in the programme. The second section is a Latin street festival. There is a tradition for the merry makers to strike pots and pans and there are optional parts in the score for these kitchen utensils.
WEST CITY YOUTH CONCERT BAND
The Pines of Rome – Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936), arr. James Curnow
Respighi was a violinist, musicologist and the leading Italian composer of the 20th Century. His compositions range over operas, ballets, choral songs and transcriptions of Italian compositions of the 16th-18th centuries. The best known and most performed works are his three orchestral Tone Poems, Fountains of Rome (1916), Pines of Rome (1924) and Roman Festivals (1928).
The Pines of Rome has four movements and you will the hear the 4th – “The Pines of the Appian Way”. The Appian Way is the great military road leading to Rome; constructed in 312BC. It was named after the Roman Magistrate Appius Caucus who supervised the project. Respighi himself described the inspiration for the piece.
“Misty dawn on the Appian Way. Solitary pine-trees guarding the magic landscape. The muffled, ceaseless rhythm of unending footsteps. The poet has a fantastic vision of bygone glories. Trumpets sound, and in the brilliance of the newly risen sun a consular army bursts forth towards the Sacred Way, mounting in triumph to the Capitol”.
The first performance took place on 14 December 1924 at the “Augusteo”, the ancient mausoleum of Emperor Augustus built in 28BC, which had been converted into a concert hall. The last bars of the poem were drowned out by “frenetic applause”.
O Magnum Mysterium – Morton Johannes Lauridsen, arr. H. Robert Reynolds
Morton Lauritsen is an American composer and teacher of Danish ancestry. He is professor emeritus of composition at the private USC Thornton School of Music, Los Angeles, where he taught for fifty-two years until his retirement in 2019.
In 1994 the Los Angeles Master Chorale had signed Lauritsen as its composer-in-residence. The director of that choir was Terry Knowles, and her husband, a Californian lawyer, commissioned a work in her honour. Looking for inspiration he found a painting “Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose” painted in 1633 by the Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán. Describing it as having “unadorned, understated beauty, quiet radiance”, the painting was exactly what he wanted to translate into music.
He chose to set “O Magnum Mysterium” (“O great Mystery”) which is a Gregorian Chant for Christmas day, included in the Roman Breviary, the liturgical book for the Roman Catholic Church. The imagery of animals standing next to a crib is from the Book of Isaiah 1.3. This text has also been set by composers such as Palestrina, William Byrd and Francis Poulenc. The premier occurred on 18 December 1994 and ever since has been acknowledged as a modern masterpiece; described as such by one reviewer:
The lean, harmonious, lyrical melodies are layered gently with rippling cascades of sound, suggestive of flowing water or waves on a shoreline – serenity that softly presents the words from the Latin text.
This arrangement for symphonic winds received the full approval of the composer.
Mother of a Revolution – Omar Thomas
Omar Thomas is an American composer born to Guyanese parents in Brooklyn, New York. He is a award winning composer and jazz artist based in Austin, Texas.
In the early hours of 28 June 1969, members of the New York City Police Department raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, Lower Manhattan. Patrons resisted arrest and a scuffle broke out. A crowd of protesters grew, and a clash between demonstrators and police ensued for several hours. Protests and riots continued for six days. This led to the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States.
Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson is credited with being one of the instigators of that uprising which is commemorated annually in Gay Pride celebrations world-wide. Born Malcolm Michaels she began wearing dresses at 5 and bravely lived her life as a trans woman until her body was found in the Hudson river in 1992.
This piece was commissioned by the Desert Winds Freedom Band, a non-profit community band in Palm Springs, Los Angles, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the “Stonewall Uprising”. It was composed to honour all trans women who live unapologetically and demand to be respected.
Nurture – Edward Fairlie
Edward Fairlie, born in 1982, was raised in Geelong a port city in Victoria, Australia. He completed a Bachelor of Music at the Victorian College of the Arts on trumpet in 2003. He is widely travelled as a keyboardist, trumpet player, a backing vocalist and a conductor. Now a full time composer, Nurture was commissioned by the Eltham High School Symphonic Band in Victoria.
Edward has provided his own programme notes:
“There are some people for whom the act of nurturing is innate. The work they do is often unheralded, acknowledgement of their effort the last thing on their mind. But nurturers carry pain, too. Their own burdens, anxieties and hardships often take a back seat to that nurturing impulse. This piece is a meditation on that idea: that some people, not without their own deep personal obstacles, … live out the powerful instinct to hold those around them in a warm embrace of care.”
WEST CITY CONCERT BAND
Seventh night of July (“Tanabata”) – Itaru Sakai
Composed when he was just 17 years old, The Seventh Night of July is one of Sakai’s most popular works for band. A musical interpretation of the famous Japanese legend where a man and woman, separated by the milky way, can only meet once a year on this night, the piece represents both the excitement of the festival celebrated in modern times, as well as the romantic story it draws inspiration from.
Movement 2 – Andante Cantabile from Concerto for Trombone and Military Band – Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Premiered in 1878 by a marine officer, Rimsky-Korsakov’s concerto is a staple of the trombone corpus of music, having had many recordings, arrangements and performances since then. West City’s own Luca Boyack will be the soloist this time, playing the sparkling second movement of this great work for military band.
Movement 9: The Hut on Hen’s Legs (Baba Yaga) and Movement 10: The Great Gate of Kiev; from Pictures at an Exhibition – Modest Mussorgsky, arr. Carl Simpson, ed. Alfred Reed
Originally for piano solo, but most famously orchestrated by Ravel, Mussorgsky’s suite of ten movements are all based on the works of Viktor Hartmann, a Russian painter and architect whose passing had inspired the composition. The movements, each based on one of Hartmann’s works, are bookended by a “Promenade” theme, a programmatic depiction of one walking in between each work, highlighting the “art gallery” feel of the suite as a whole.
West City Concert Band will be playing the final two movements of the suite, the Hartmann artwork of each having survived and are viewable to this day. The Hut on Hen’s Legs (Baba Yaga) is based on an illustration of a clock in the Russian-style, itself drawing inspiration from the witch’s house of lore. The Great Gate of Kiev is an unrealised project design for a grandiose city gate, entered by Hartmann as part of a competition.